


The Stolen Toaster

by Cerauno



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Case Fic, Comedy, Crime Scenes, Gen, Humor, John Being the Most Patient Man Alive, Sherlock Being Sherlock, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson Being Idiots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-17
Updated: 2014-11-17
Packaged: 2018-02-25 18:23:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2631665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cerauno/pseuds/Cerauno
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How Sherlock and John first started throwing things to each other, with initially disastrous results.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Stolen Toaster

**Author's Note:**

> Alternate Title: "How Watson Learned to Catch"
> 
> Thanks to Jezebel for her Britpicking.
> 
> ∙ ╌╍╌ ∙ ╌╍╌ ∙ ╌╍╌ ∙
> 
> Warning: This work contains some swearing and brief descriptions of violent crime.

The first time Sherlock threw something to John, it would have been better described as Sherlock throwing something _at_ John. Specifically, it had been a small, two-slot toaster that he'd filched from a recent crime scene, and it had hit John square in the face.

"I don't get it. This was directly in the path of the blood spatter we saw on the walls," Sherlock had said, pacing around the sitting room with his eyes fixed hard on the slightly battered toaster in his hand.

"But just _look_ at it! It's completely clean. Well, clean of blood, anyway. Still, it was obviously placed on the counter and plugged into the kitchen wall outlet before Patricia Meers was murdered, then unplugged and set aside, and then replaced on the counter after she was dismembered by the murderers. But _why?_ " Sherlock continued to fume.

"Wait, 'murderers'? Plural?" John asked, looking up from the half-written blog entry on his laptop.

"Two separate and unaccounted-for sets of boot prints on the floor, John. Try not to fall behind," Sherlock snapped back without so much as glancing in John's direction.

"Ah," John muttered, frowning slightly as he went back to typing.

"Why remove the toaster though, and then put it back? The plug for the model of electric circular saw they used to dismember the body for transport was the type meant for a single standard outlet, so it wouldn't have blocked or been blocked by the toaster's plug. The cord was either ten or twelve feet long, so it wouldn't have reached the next closest outlet in the bathroom. And it _had_ to have been Meers' toaster, as the crumb tray contained burnt remnants of her favorite type of bread from the bakery down the block, and also the brand of crumpets we found in her breadbox. Not to mention it was covered in her fingerprints, and no one else's."

John just nodded and made a vague 'hmm' sound now and again as Sherlock thought aloud, though his own attention was focused on finishing his entry from their previous case. Then a stray thought occurred to him.

"Sherlock, I understand why the toaster stands out; very strange, that, but...well, is it actually relevant to finding her killers?" He asked, already bracing himself for a verbal beating about how how _everything_ is relevant.

"Of course it is! I don't know how, not yet at least, but _this_ ," He proclaimed, shaking the toaster for emphasis. " _This_ will almost certainly be the key to finding out who killed Patricia Meers, and why. The murderers were unusually careful to cover their tracks, but there are always clues left behind, John. Always. Even the most diligent of killers slip up in tiny little ways, and this toaster was a very big slip-up, indeed. It can and _will_ lead us to them, once I know why...why...."

Sherlock trailed off, leering at the lifeless toaster with an almost manic intensity. John waited for him to continue, but realized he was back in his own thoughts again, unreachable. After a good couple of minutes, he sighed and went back to typing.

Then Sherlock gasped dramatically, looking up at the empty space in front of him before glaring back down at the toaster again, suddenly.

" _Of course!_ The circuit breaker!" He shouted at his own warped reflection on the toaster's dented surface.

"Circuit breaker?" John queried absently, just glancing up when Sherlock started getting hysterical.

" _Yes!_ It's an old building, badly in need of repairs. Also infested with mice, which tend to chew on electric cables in the walls. Hence, the electrics in the building are very likely faulty, and the central circuit breaker old and sensitive to the amount of power that modern appliances draw. The murderers probably have a history of living in rundown buildings on a tight budget, much like Meers did. They knew that a power tool like the saw they used would need as much concentrated power as that particular circuit could provide in order to avoid blowing a fuse and halting their entire operation, not to mention drawing unwanted attention to themselves."

John winced at Sherlock's use of the word 'operation' in reference to a brutal homicide.

"So they unplugged the toaster and set it aside in the sitting room so that it wouldn't block the saw's cord as they moved around the kitchen table, as well as several other appliances so as not to overload the breaker!"

"Couldn't they just have moved the toaster over without unplugging it? I mean, unless they were toasting something, it wouldn't have been using any power by just sitting there," John noted.

"Wrong, appliances and electronic devices draw a minute amount of electricity even when they're not being used, so long as they're plugged in."

"Wait, seriously? So everything that's plugged in right now is actually using up power?" John asked nervously, glancing around the sitting room at the telly, their three laptops—Sherlock's MacBook, John's Windows laptop, and another Windows laptop that had recently appeared without explanation, which John strongly suspected was Lestrade's—and everything else within view that had a power cord.

"Yes. Your phone and laptop chargers, especially," Sherlock said with a dismissive wave of his hand.

"Well, that explains our electric bill," John groaned, pinching the bridge of his nose.

"Actually, our bill last month was mostly due to the experiment with the frozen octopus I conducted two weeks ago," Sherlock commented airily.

"Oh, fantastic," John huffed.

"Yes, I thought so as well."

"I was being sarc—"

"Now all we have to do is check the residency records for the low-income apartment buildings in that area until a discrepancy surfaces. _This is it_ , John!"

John saw a flurry of excited movement in his peripheral vision while still staring accusingly at his laptop charger on the floor, and looked up with wide eyes just in time to see the toaster in question arcing through the air towards him.

"What th—!"

His right arm didn't quite make it in time to block the incoming projectile, and the corner of the toaster collided with the spot right between his eyes with a dizzying thud.

" ** _AAUGH!_** Bloody _fucking_ hell, Sherlock!" He bellowed as the toaster went clattering onto the floor.

" _WHAT_ was that meant to achieve, exactly?!" He went on, clutching his face tenderly and feeling an equally furious lump already beginning to form there.

"I—I thought you would catch it," Sherlock explained quietly, with a visible wince.

"Well, yeah! Maybe if you'd given me some damn warning first!"

"You're usually more alert."

"You threw a sodding toaster at me!"

"Err...John..."

" _What!_ "

"...Your nose. It's...um," Sherlock pointed at John's face hesitantly.

John lifted his hand from the spot just below his forehead and touched two fingers to his nostrils, feeling a warm wetness leaking out.

"Oh, that's just great," He spat, examining the blood on his hand.

John then tossed his laptop aside onto the couch beside him and stormed off to the bathroom, pinching his nose firmly.

"Next time just catch it!" Sherlock shouted after him, which was immediately answered by a heavy slam of the bathroom door.

\- - - - -

The next day, the toaster had been wiped clean and discreetly snuck into the evidence storage room at Scotland Yard, complete with an accurately labeled anti-contamination bag sealed around it, shortly before the killers were apprehended and thrown, handcuffed, into the back of a police cruiser. John and Sherlock watched from the sidelines as the murderers, two cousins who had immigrated from the Ukraine with strong ties to an Eastern European crime syndicate, struggled against the arresting officers and shouted loudly about their rights being violated.

"So? What was Meers' connection with those two?" John asked, in a tired, yet expectant way.

"Meers grew up in Kraków with her Polish mother after her English father disappeared when she was an infant. She traveled to London two years ago in hopes of finding him, but quickly fell into debt after being sacked from several low-paying jobs due to her uncontrolled kleptomania. Nearly everything in her apartment that was small enough for her to take on her own was stolen merchandise, including the toaster. Unable to pay back the money she owed to the Ukrainian thugs she'd borrowed from, she was preparing to flee the country when the Lysenko cousins were dispatched to deal with her," Sherlock said in the coolly smug tone that John was all too familiar with.

"Poor girl," John muttered, shaking his head. "And you knew all that from staring at the toaster?"

"Of course not," Sherlock sniffed, meeting John's sidelong glance and pointedly refusing to let his eyes focus on the large and conspicuous plaster taped across the bridge of his badly bruised nose. "The toaster was simply the key to revealing the final details. I knew Meers was of English-Polish descent judging by her surname, the photos of her and her mother taken at places in or near Kraków, and confirmed by her immigration records. After finding the list of tenants living in her low-income neighbourhood and noticing that nearly all of them were of Eastern European origin, with many of them directly affiliated with organized crime, I knew that it was highly likely that the killers were Slavic and within a reasonably young age group to have carried a large electric saw and then her body in and out of the building unnoticed, likely disguised as repairmen. The chances of her being randomly murdered without a personal motive in such a painstakingly cautious manner was almost nil, so that led me to conclude that she had been taking out multiple small loans from one of several possible crime families. After that, it was only a matter of narrowing down the pool of suspects."

John grinned, almost in spite of himself, and then winced as the change in expression caused his nose to twinge painfully.

"Remarkable, as ever," He said drily, gently massaging his face and turning to head for home.

Sherlock turned to leave with him, content in having solved the case and not wanting to stick around long enough for Lestrade to start asking him questions. As they walked, John's mood sobered further, even while Sherlock was smiling like an idiot.

"I'm still mad at you, you know," John reminded him as he waved down a cab.

"I know."

"You'd just better hope this doesn't leave a scar."

"It won't," Sherlock promised.


End file.
